The Four Secrets of Successful PPC Campaigns (Part 2)
by Barbara Fischer / Trendhaus Pty Ltd
Over the past decade, online marketing has become an integral part of most businesses’ marketing strategies. In particular, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have become one of the most common channels for any business to sell its products and services.
The first installment of this two-part article explored the importance of having an online strategy and how to prepare your website for a successful campaign. The second half and final installment will evaluate the concluding steps in the successful PPC campaign puzzle.
Secret 3: Start small – Choose one Search Engine only
Especially if you are dipping your toe into the pay per click pool for the first time, it is more than OK to start off small. In my experience, too many companies are confronted by the variety of choice between different PPC search engines and are tricked into thinking they need to be on all these so-called “networks” immediately. New online advertisers are often considering big players such as Google Ad Words and Yahoo! Search Marketing (Yahoo!7 and ninemsn), but also the smaller fish such as Sensis, Ask, MIVA and Mirago. Too many different campaigns (each of which are run according to different rules, different budgets and different funding) are too much to juggle for most first time online advertisers.
It is important to stay focused when deciding on your first search marketing network, and refer back to your online strategy to properly match your purpose to the correct network. I would always recommend trialing a campaign on Google due to its amount of market share (55%) and quality traffic. If your campaign performs well on Google, chances are it will also perform on other networks.
Walk before you can run. Test your campaign on one network first to get a feel for it, and when you feel more confident then consider branching out.
Secret 4: Trial and Assess the Results
After choosing the correct search engine network to implement your PPC campaign, embark on a simple three week trial campaign. The great thing about PPC is that you can pause it whenever you like, so you are not locked into any long term commitment after your designated ‘trial period’.
Once you have seen the campaign results for the first three weeks, you (or your online agency) should be able to identify trends for your particular business. For instance, you should be able to see which of your key words were most sought after, which words attracted most enquiries or led to sales, which “click-days” and “click times” were extremely popular and which companies you compete with.
Example: one of our clients in the beauty industry knew after their three week trial period that Wednesdays and Thursdays between 12noon and 4pm were extremely popular for them in regards to clicks and enquiries for their services. As a result, they shifted their entire media budget on these 2 days and now receive twice as many enquiries as they had gotten in previous weeks – with the same investment!
Whilst trends are important to analyze for both your medium- and long-term online strategy, you must also closely analyze the direct impact that the campaign has on your business. Your sales team (or whoever answers calls in your business) needs to be briefed before the campaign starts and should monitor where new business leads are coming from. Analysis of your new business enquiries and where they found out about you is important to accurately gauge the impact of a prolonged PPC campaign.
Use your trial campaign as an indication of what is to come. In my experience, PPC campaigns improve immensely over time and a feature of their success depends on the amount of time that is invested in their development.
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